Answered By: Chris Clouser

Last Updated: Jan 29, 2015Views: 85

There are a couple of ways you can find children's books like that. Primarily, you need to use the PILOT online catalog of books available in the IUP Libraries. To find PILOT, go to the Library Home Page (www.iup.edu/Library) and click on the "Online Catalog" option. This will open the PILOT catalog. Once connected to PILOT, your first search should be a "Subject Heading Search". Click that option and then enter: "English language synonyms and antonyms juvenile literature" in the "Search For" box. This will bring up the entries for several children's books on the topic. You can expand your search by doing a keyword search limited to the Children's Collection. On the main PILOT page, click on the button on the bottom right that says "Search Limits". This will take you to a page that has all kinds of options that you can set to apply to your search. In the "Location" box, scroll down and select "Children's Collection". Then click the "Set Search Limits" button. This will return you to the main page which will now have a "Search Limits Are In Effect" note. Now, all keyword searches you do will only return those items that are in the Children's Collection. Since not all of the options on the "Author/Title/Subject" search page are keyword, it is usually better to use the "Guided Search" tab. All of the searches there are keyword. On the "Guided Search" tab enter synonym? in the first "Search For" box and antonym? on the second line. Make sure the radio button between the lines is set to "OR". The question mark tells the system to look for any keywords that begin with that text string. That way you get the singular and the plural with a single search term. The "OR" tells the system to look for one word OR the other. As long as the system matches on one of the words it will return a hit. That search should return more items to look at. Another method of identifying books is to use a printed bibliography of children's books by topic. One example is the book "A to Zoo". It lists children's books by subject. You can find that book in the Reference Collection on the 1st floor of Stapleton Library with the call number [REF] Z 1073.L715 1998. There will be other, similar titles in that general area, as well. Once you identify a specific children's book title, you can use PILOT to see if IUP owns that book. One final method would be to use the "Children's Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD)" to identify titles. You can find CLCD from the Library Home Page. Just click on "Article Databases". Then select CLCD from the alphabetic list. This database will allow you to search for titles by subject. Again, you'll need to check the PILOT database to see if IUP owns those titles.